Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them

The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it's easy to bypass and you're not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore

I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don't give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable

Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don't see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible thonk

  • WilsonWilson [comrade/them, he/him]
    ·
    15 days ago

    We have this argument all the time concept vs implementation. Scooters seem like a great idea but when implemented by SV tech bros it ends up being a nightmare. I was in Austin tx for the eclipse and those lime scooters were everywhere. The was a dozen lying on the sidewalk in front of Amy's ice cream. Scooters abandoned on the grass in front of the capital. I even saw one on the the east-side interstate by the tesla factory. Its a shame Austin didn't just do the scooters themselves. City employees would drive around with a pickup truck and keep things tidy. Make the first three hours of use free so everyone can use them.

    • FourteenEyes [he/him]
      ·
      15 days ago

      You got to love the silicon valley innovation of "what if we were just lazy and didn't pick up the products after people were done using them?"

    • itappearsthat [he/him]
      ·
      15 days ago

      in a way they took the shopping cart return problem and blew it up a hundred thousand times